Big news this month: the Sensor Watch Pro prelaunch is live at Crowd Supply and you can sign up for updates today!

It’s been a minute since the last update, so just as a refresher: the original Sensor Watch design was a bit too complex to manufacture at the original price point. To keep the project going, we realized we would need to streamline and simplify the design, or charge more for a more complex design. Sensor Watch Lite achieved that first goal, offering a board swap for the classic Casio at a comparable price to what we offered in the original campaign.

Still, we hit that price point at a cost: we had to lose the modular 9-pin connector.

Sensor Watch Pro is bringing that back, along with some new features that we’re incredibly stoked about:

• We’re adding a third color to the backlight: with a red, green and blue LED, you can light up your wrist in any color of the rainbow.
• An infrared light sensor opens the door to new possibilities for sensing, as well as possibilities for data input without cracking open the watch case.
• Finally, we’re working hard to amplify the buzzer on Sensor Watch Pro, to make it more useful for alarms and countdown timers. While this feature is still in development, we’re feeling pretty confident about getting it done.
• We’re also planning to launch Sensor Watch Pro with an accelerometer add-on board, which should open the door to new kinds of sensing such as activity and sleep tracking.
• Finally, we’re going to offer a custom LCD swap in addition to the board swap — more on that in a moment!

Everyone over here, from Oddly Specific Objects and friends to the good folks at Crowd Supply, are very excited to bring Sensor Watch Pro into the world, and I hope you’ll join me on that journey by signing up for updates over at the campaign prelaunch page!

A Custom LCD for Sensor Watch

The original famous Casio F-91W has a very minimalist LCD that’s designed for two very simple applications: displaying the time and date, and serving as a stopwatch. By getting extremely creative, we’ve managed to cram all kinds of new features into it, from sunrise and moon phase to temperature sensing and tarot reading. Still, it has its limitations, and it’s always been a dream of mine to offer an LCD swap alongside the board swap.

As of today, the dream is reality:

This custom LCD fits into the F-91W’s original plastic housing, and offers a lot more capabilities. Where the original famous Casio LCD offered 72 addressable segments, this one offers 92! We use those segments to improve and augment the original famous layout:

• The “Day of Week” display now offers space for three alphanumeric letters, instead of two.
• The “Day of Month” display can show any number from 0 to 99 — an improvement over the old display, which could only count to 39.
• The “Clock” display now offers a decimal point, and a leading 1 for displaying longitudes east of Bangkok and west of Bismarck (along with temperatures over 100° F)

We’ve also added a “Low Battery” indicator, and a half-moon to indicate sleep mode, along with several other clever improvements, such as the ability to display letters in the seconds display and blink the colon autonomously.

A lot of thought and love went into the design of this custom LCD and, the best part is, it’s also compatible with both the original Sensor Watch and Sensor Watch Lite! While we’ll be releasing it as part of the Sensor Watch Pro campaign, you’ll also be able to purchase it separately, right here on Crowd Supply, later this year.

Battery Test: Day 873

For some time now — since early 2022 — I’d been testing the battery life of Sensor Watch, and updating y’all from time to time about it. The last time I mentioned the battery test in one of these updates was in April of 2023 and, at that time, I’d been running on the same coin cell for 420 days. This validated, for me, the promise of “over a year on a coin cell”.

The thing of it is: the watch kept ticking. In fact it ticked straight past day 730, the two year mark, in February of 2024. It kept ticking, all through the spring and into the summer, until earlier this month, on day 873, when the battery died after a day of demoing the watch at the HOPE conference in New York.

To be clear: while this watch was my daily driver, I didn’t wear it all the time. It spent a lot of its time in low energy mode, simply telling the time, and not chiming on the hour. But I also gave a watch to my friend Ben at the same time — February of 2022 — and he did leave the hourly chime on, and presumably woke it up more often. This pair of battery tests gives me two data points for Sensor Watch: the expected battery life under heavy use, and under light use.

In the graph below, the green line represents my watch, the battery test I’ve been running for just shy of two and a half years. The yellow line represents my friend Ben’s watch, and the X marks are the dates I caught up with him and wrote down his battery voltage. This pair of battery discharge curves signal to me that Sensor Watch, as shipped, can last from 1.7 to 2.4 years on a single coin cell — and that’s not some kind of theoretical number. That’s data backed by empirical, real-world testing.

Your mileage may vary, especially if you build your own firmware. Certain watch faces like Wyoscan or the Stock Stopwatch face tend to use more power. Still, I think it’s pretty awesome to see this extremely hackable gadget getting well over a year of battery life from a single 100 milliampere hour coin cell. It also signals to me that we have room to hang some extra sensors onto Sensor Watch Pro, while still making good on that year-plus battery life promise.

That’s all the Sensor Watch news for now! Again, please sign up for Sensor Watch Pro campaign updates. I’m so excited to share some of these new objects with you later this year!

- Joey